Before Hillary Clinton gets to the White House, she's going to have to get some distance from Wall Street.

The Democratic frontrunner once again saw her Wall Street ties — from campaign donations to speaking fees — turned into a minefield as both Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley ganged up on her during Sunday night's NBC/YouTube debate to disparage her close ties to investment banks including Goldman Sachs.

The debate over Wall Street was the feistiest of the night, underscoring the growing tensions between Clinton and her burgeoning rival Sanders, a one-time outlier who now boasts about how much speed and support his campaign had picked up in the polls.

Sanders, in particular, made several remarks about Goldman Sachs' influence over Clinton, the Treasury and the financial system. Goldman Sachs, dubbed a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity...jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" in an infamous Rolling Stone piece from 2009, served as the financial villain of the Democratic debate on Sunday night.

Sanders noted that two recent Treasury secretaries — one Republican, Hank Paulson, and one Democrat, Robert Rubin — came from Goldman.

"Here's a promise: if I'm elected president, Goldman Sachs is not going to bring forth a secretary of the Treasury for the Sanders administration," Sanders said.

He grew heated when he attacked Clinton for her Goldman ties, speaking loudly and gesturing rapidly.

"The first difference is I don't take money from big banks. I don't get personal speaking fees from Goldman Sachs," Sanders said pointedly, to oohs from the audience.

The jabs against Clinton didn't just center on O'Malley and Sanders' insistence that she was too close to Wall Street; they also explicitly painted Wall Street as elite and corrupt and sought to portray Clinton as part of the same financial web by accepting campaign money from investment banks.

After a few more similarly oblique references, Sanders turned directly against Clinton, seeking to differentiate himself as a man of the people while painting Clinton as cozy with lawbreaking millionaires.

"You've received over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year," Sanders said. "I find it very strange that a major financial institution that pays $5 billion in fines for breaking the laws, not one of their executives is prosecuted while kids who smoke marijuana get a jail sentence."

Sanders made the same comparison about money and its protection from prosecution earlier in the night when he said, "Who is satisfied that millions of people have police records for possessing marijuana when the CEOs of Wall Street companies who destroyed our country have no police records?"

"I won't take $ from Wall St""If I got $ from Wall St I'd burn it.""I'd use it to build a time machine to stop them from sending it to me"

Sanders, in particular, took pains to undermine Clinton's promises to be tough on Wall Street by connecting her to elite financial firms and high-society fundraising. He distanced his own campaign from that financial network by calling for a "revolution" to liberate America from the financial control of billionaires.

When Clinton stepped in to defend herself, she ended up struggling. She touted attack ads that "hedge fund billionaires" and Karl Rove had paid for against her candidacy.

But as Clinton made a case for her distance from Wall Street, she was shut down by O'Malley, who was struggling for speaking time in a distant third place but still bold enough to openly contradict Clinton under his breath.

"That's not true....oh, come on," O'Malley challenged Clinton as she spoke about her support for regulation of the major banks.

Clinton has previously tried to play down her Wall Street ties. In a previous debate, she claimed, "about 3% of my donations come from people in the finance and investment world. You can go to OpenSecrets.org and check that." Later, Open Secrets said Clinton's haul from Wall Street is closer to 7.2% of her fundraising.

Over the course of her career, Clinton's top five donors are Wall Street banks or financial firms, with Citigroup leading and Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley all in the top five, according to data from OpenSecrets.org.

Hillary Clinton's top corporate contributors over the course of her political career.

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